Banding on painted walls

Cagey75

Cagey75

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Keith
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Any advice on how to deal with this. Shot some portraits of the kids earlier, and I got terrible banding on the back wall. It is a plain wall, magnolia. I used 3 flashes, 2 to light the subject, one down behind aimed at the wall to try blow it out. I know I'm doing something wrong ... I've only used one light for the past 5 years, just experimenting with 3 now. I've watched Zack Arias' one light which was a great help, but he never mentioned this issue.

Here's an example:


chic by Cagey75, on Flickr

The circular bands, that should be a smooth gradient, not banded. Is she too close to the wall? She was about 3 feet from it, the flash illuminating it was about 2ft from it.

The vignetting was added in post btw, it has nothing to do with the banding. I used it to help cover it really, give the backing a softer appearance .
 
Banding like that is often caused by Jpeg compression. Is it visible in the raw file?
 
Aha!! nail on head. I did wonder why I hadn't noticed it in LR, all seemed fine. I did the initial tweaks there, then opened it up in photoshop, that's when it reared it's ugly head.

Here's a the raw zoomed in a bit, no obvious banding.


http://i.imgur.com/UXNJn.jpg

Thanks. Now that I know what causes it, how to avoid it?
 
When exporting from LR, make sure 0 compression is applied.
 
I'll have to double check, I never purposely set any kind of compression. Though, I only recently switched from LR3 to LR4 ... unless it's default and I never bothered to check. Will do now ...

[edit] That's it. By default LR4 had set exporting Jpegs to quality:60 - why, I don't know! Changed it to 100 now and will re-try those same images, see if that solves the issue. Cheers ;)

I've not noticed until now because the banding hasn't shown on other images.
 
Last edited:
From member, when I switched, LR set compression at 70%. Switched off instantly!
 
It's an odd setting for them to have by default. As you don't even see it unless you scroll right down within the export window. You have to actually go looking for it. No idea why they don't just have this auto-set to 100 quality.
 
Agreed. I hate the layout for Lightroom exports in general.
 
Personally, if that was my photo I would be far more concerned with the colour cast than with the jpg compression...
 
Can you elaborate on that? I'm not sure what you mean. I de-saturated the colours/vibrance, was going for a certain look. Really it was more a tester for the lights though. But I'm all for tips ;)
 
Cagey75 said:
Can you elaborate on that? I'm not sure what you mean. I de-saturated the colours/vibrance, was going for a certain look. Really it was more a tester for the lights though. But I'm all for tips ;)
Click to expand...

Can't you see that there is an overall 'tint'?
And can't you see the colour pollution, especially on the edges, from the magnolia wall, caused by light reflected from that wall?
 
yeah, I cleaned up most of it in post, if you're looking very close you'll still see some of course. Hate that wall, next time I'll use a white back drop. But the overall tint was done in post, I use a warming filter, and some desaturation and tinkered with a few things. It's not how I process usually, just trying different things. I only see what you're saying in the blown highlights around her.
 
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